The Role of Religion in Medical Education

Amy DeBaets, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine

Religion and spirituality have taken on a variety of roles within the training of physicians: as a source of ethical values for clinical practice, as a source of diversity and cultural learning for patient care, as a source of reflection from clinicians’ own values, and as a source of professional and vocational identity formation. Each of these functions has an important role, but what are the best ways to structure the inclusion of religion and spirituality in medical education in a contemporary, religiously pluralistic environment?

This paper will argue that each of these functions is important at different points within medical education, not despite the religious and cultural pluralism of contemporary medicine, but because of it. It is important in training new physicians where many of the ethical values held by the profession originate from, that they have been traditionally drawn from religious values, even if many who hold them now are not themselves religious.

In this context, we must also teach clinicians to understand the religious values held by their patients, and how those values influence their decisions in healthcare. What is often deemed training in “cultural competence” is misnamed. In practice, it frequently leads to the reduction of entire cultures to stereotypes that may or may not fit the needs and values of any individual patient. Rather, we should encourage medical trainees to engage humbly and deeply in really listening and responding to the patients and families they serve, and to teach them to respect the values of those for whom they care, even when they disagree with those values and choices. This is crucial from the start of medical education, but takes on new importance in the early clinical years, in which physicians’ habits of practice are formed.

It is in the time when training focuses on initial clinical practice that medical trainees’ reflections on their own deeply-held values likewise comes into focus. Not only are they then able to recognize their own biases and innate reactions to spiritually-laden choices, they can better appreciate the sources of the values of others as they interact with them.

Finally, physician education should emphasize the ways in which religious and spiritual values, traditions, and practices enable physicians’ understanding of their own sense of calling to the medical vocation, as and they grow as professionals who then shape the next generation of their profession. This can and should take place all the way through their training and beyond, but it becomes important as they transition out of the initial years of their training and turn toward leadership in the profession and the training of others.